Shakespeare’s KING LEAR includes an interesting subplot. Edmund, the son of the wealthy and powerful Earl of Gloucester, is not an heir to the Earl because the Earl was not married to Edmund’s mother. The Earl had had an affair. Thus, Edmund’s half-brother Edgar is the heir. Edmund bitterly resents the stigma of illegitimacy and hatches a plan to kill both his brother and his father, leaving him the new Earl of Gloucester.
In an Elizabethan drama about lords and ladies, none of this is remarkable. What makes it remarkable is William Shakespeare’s flourishing way with words. He knows where to insert a great monologue, and he fleshes out a speech like nothing we have seen before. It begins with Edmund asking why those born out of wedlock are labeled ‘bastard’ and their morals considered to be base…
“Why ‘bastard’? Wherefore ‘base’?
When my dimensions are as well compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true,
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With ‘base’? With baseness? Bastardy? Base, base?
Who, in the lusty stealth of nature, take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed,
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops,
Got ‘tween asleep and wake? Well, then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land:
Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate: fine word, legitimate!
Well, my legitimate, if this letter speed,
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow, I prosper:
Now gods, stand up for bastards!”
After arguing that his body and mind are as true as the legitimate son’s, that the circumstances of his conception were no worse than the legitimate son’s, and that he knows his father loves him as much as he loves the legitimate son, Edmund concludes with a prayer:
“Now, gods stand up for bastards!”[2]
I’m not sure how sincere this prayer is, being Edmund’s ready-set-go to himself before he launches his murderous scheme. But either way, God—the real God—answered Edmund’s prayer long ago.
Throughout the Bible, God blessed not only second-born sons, but sons born to forbidden relationships. God blessed Abraham’s son Ishmael and made him a great nation. God blessed Perez, one of two twins born to Judah through Judah’s daughter-in-law Tamar—and Perez became an ancestor to King David. God blessed Jephthah the son of a prostitute and made him the Judge of Israel.
And the great King David was Jesse’s overlooked seventh son, see 1 Chronicles 2:15. When Samuel came to anoint one of Jesse’s sons, Jesse did not even send for David, assuming it had to be one of the six older sons. But God chose Jesse’s seventh son. And who would succeed to the throne of David a generation later? Amnon was David’s firstborn, then followed Daniel, Absalom, Adonijah, Shephatiah, Ithream, Shimea, Shobab, Nathan, and Solomon. 1 Chronicles 3:1-5. Solomon was David’s tenth son! Not only that, Solomon’s mother was Bathsheba.
Solomon was born to a forbidden marriage.
In fact, this thing with Bathsheba was so much worse than a forbidden marriage.
David and Bathsheba had an affair, leading David to murder David’s deeply loyal friend and Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah the Hittite. The fact that David married Bathsheba later is almost beside the point. Solomon’s life will forever be associated with David’s great sin.
Think of it: David and Bathsheba should never have been together, under any circumstances.
There should not have been a Solomon.
Solomon is sort of the ultimate ‘Oops Baby.’
After all, the sins of his father and mother nearly destroyed the entire kingdom, leading to the rebellion and treasonous insurrection of Absalom, to war, to David and his family running from the palace as fugitives, to a bloody civil war.
Solomon had never known a world where his father was not a morally questionable hero.
David had been wearing a scarlet letter during Solomon’s entire life. He was a fallen man, at least in terms of his reputation. And Solomon, a tenth son and worse, the son of Bathsheba, must have worn some of that shame around his own neck.
But God gives grace. God gives grace to Solomon. God gives grace to so-called ‘oops babies.’ In the words of Edmund, God stands up for bastards. Why?
Why did God choose Solomon? To reveal His glory. To show us His grace.
It happens every day: young people give birth under less-than ideal circumstances, and fall in love with the baby. Grace is God stepping “outside” His rules by making the baby such a blessing that the parents cannot imagine their lives without that child. THAT is God’s grace: the supernatural transformation of mistakes into miracles. Such amazing grace!
As I’ve asked elsewhere, does God see unplanned children as—if you’ll pardon the harsh, trendy term— “Oops Babies”? That is, maybe He had a plan for the parents, but they messed up, so the children are doomed to be mistakes forever, a living monument to their parents’ sin?
Will children conceived out of wedlock forever be “damaged goods” because God had other plans? No! God’s grace is bigger than that.
No matter who you are, God planned you before He made the world. It may never make sense to us—but God’s grace is beyond our comprehension.
In fact, this may be one of the clearest examples of the astounding, inexplicable nature of grace: God’s law forbids premarital or extramarital sex. Yet to the children born of such a union, God often shows extraordinary grace, choosing them for great things.
Where human logic, with it’s unfeeling, mathematical calculations, might regard a child’s origin as “illegitimate” and outside God’s plan, thus that child’s entire future is unplanned and nothing good will ever come, God’s grace transcends brutal human logic.
Don’t believe me?
David and Bathsheba should never have been together. Never. Yet God chose their son Solomon over nine older brothers and half-brothers. God chose the son of Bathsheba not only to wear the crown but to build Solomon’s Temple, the greatest house of worship in history.
God’s grace is so much bigger and more mysterious than brutal, mathematical, human logic.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” Isaiah 55:9.
Praise Him for His amazing grace!
AΩ.
[1] KING LEAR, Act 1, Scene 2.
[2] I hope you will pardon the language and understand why I find this one of the funniest lines in Shakespeare. (I suspect it was not intended to be funny, but that only makes it funnier.) For related insights, you may wish to consider this provocatively titled sermon/blog: https://www.refugeutah.org/matthew-6-7-9
Household Words: 